Google Chrome will soon come with a built in ad blocker

Google may be one of the world’s largest ad companies, but the firm is just as much against awful ads like the rest of us. From next year, Google’s Chrome Browser will come with a built-in ad blocker to help beat back the scourge of poorly done exploitative ads.

It may seem counter-intuitive for Google to block ads in Chrome, but it makes sense. Google’s whole business model revolves around selling ads, which fund much of the free services and websites on the internet. Now, while less scrupulous bodies have taken advantage of this by providing intrusive ads, malicious pop-ups and the like, this results in people blocking ads wholesale. In this scenario, both sites and corporations With that in mind, it’s only natural that Google would work to get the troublesome ads blocked.

This won’t be an ad blocker per se, the Wall Street Journal describes this as an ad filter. This means that it’ll serve more like Adblock Plus’ settings for acceptable ads, only filtering out ads which are judged to be unacceptable.  While there will likely be some faux concern from some who argue that Google’s Adblock would be unethical due to Google inevitably favouring their own ads anyway, that would be uninformed.

Google also isn’t the one who is determining which ads are unacceptable, it’ll be the Coalition for Better Ads, an organisation formed of bodies including Thomson Reuters, the Washington Post and Facebook who sets the standards, and they’ll be working with publishers to determine which ads are acceptable and which are not.

Chrome being a voluntary, user initiated install and not a compulsory app should also cripple any accusations of monopoly abuse by competitors.

While Microsft’s Edge doesn’t have a built-in adblocker, users can still rely on the Adblock extension for the same experience. For everyone else, Google wants to have them covered.